The distinction I made between the image and the visual is pragmatic.
I simply found it practical to use two different words. There's also the
fact that the word "visual" comes up so often in the vocabulary of the
press and on the lips of its "art directors." The visual is at once reading
and seeing: it's seeing what you're supposed to read. You know how to read
the press when you can quickly decipher a newspaper's visual, even if it's
a newspaper without photos, like LE MONDE. Maybe we're heading towards
societies which are better and better at reading (deciphering, decoding
through reflexes of reading) but less and less able to see. So I call "image"
what still holds out against an experience of vision and of the "visual."
The visual is the optical verification of a procedure of power (technological,
political, advertising or military power). A procedure which calls for
no other commentary than "reception perfect, AOK." Obviously, the visual
has to do with the optic nerve, but that doesn't make it an image.

For me, the sine qua non of the image is alterity. Every
culture does something with that more-or-less empty slot, the slot where
"there is some other" (to paraphrase Lacan). No doubt we go to war in order
to fill that slot, for a given moment, with only a single occupant: the
enemy. It's simpler like that. So, when the so-called "Gulf War" appeared
inevitable, we could imagine that we were about to see the other, or at
least that "we'd see what there was to see." Even if you don't much care
for war, you know it forms part of the human equation, it's "a way of seeing."

Some people must have expected to see a war in images, others
a war of images, if only propaganda images. On one side there would be
the Third World with its arms, its logic, its tricks and its naiveté,
a kind of clumsy heritage of twentieth-century propaganda (more like the
USSR, the single party, etc.) On the other side would be the first country
of the First World, heavily into propaganda too, but a little bit stuck
in the wake of Vietnam (the defense of democracy, of the free world, etc.)
In the end, all of us in the West were waiting for a spectacle, and we
didn't get it.

Instead we "watched" an incredible face-off between two ways of not
making an image (the way you say: don't make waves.) A fairly unexpected
way (from the Iraqis) and a very unexpected way (from the Americans.) For
years, the Iraqis had spent lots of money and energy trying to buy up the
intellectuals of the entire Arab world. It must not have worked, because
the moment they appeared on the world screen, in mondovision, they
gave up the idea of providing any image whatsoever of the Iraqi nation-state.
But on the other side of the coin, you can't help but think the Americans
are also pretty short on an image of America, because they decided to wage
(and win) this war while simultaneously blurring all its traces. So Bush
and Hussein coproduced a black-out of every image of Iraq and the Iraqis,
and it was a complete success.

In a sense, it's as though the Iraqis had slipped below the line
of the image, and the Americans above it. That line is the line
of alterity. It's the other in so far as he is still visible, however mean
and nasty he may be. Ultimately it's the look in his eyes that makes
him exist as a visible other. As Levinas said, it's a lot harder for me
to kill you when I can look you in the eye. And it's true, executioners
have always had a hard time looking their victims in the eye. It's not
impossible, alas, there are always perverts and brutes, but still: it's
difficult. On the other hand, remember that passage in Rousseau:
it's always easy to push a button that will cause the death of a man on
the other side of the planet, far from us. And that's where things stand.

The other's eyes have disappeared, by a common and implicit accord.
Saddam Hussein was satisfied with a vague, emotional, all-purpose image
of the "Arab world." And in the face of that, to our great surprise,
the Americans seem to have learned their lessons from Vietnam and moved
into a new phase of their power, where it's no longer a matter of war but
of a gigantic police action. Now, when you're carrying out a police action,
you don't post up the mug of the people thrown in prison, nor of the courageous
cops. You do it in wartime because in war there's a lingering presupposition
of equality between the combatants. Something of this equality may have
functioned on the Iraqi side, a follow-up to the ancient duel between Saladin
and Richard the Lion Heart. But even if that's the case, it's a pure fantasy
with no response whatsoever from the American end (the Crusades aren't
part of their history.)

For my part, I was surprised by the way the Americans moved on without
a single blow from the realm of the image to that of the visual. And the
visual, this time, was the guided tour around the cop shop, or to the armaments
expo at the Bourget military airport [near Paris.] This was what we were
shown for six months, without us really grasping the meaning. Day after
day we saw how almost 5,000 soldiers had ended up in Saudi Arabia with
incredible equipment. We thought it was the trailer for a horrendous epic,
but no, it was already the film! When the Western media decided
to get up close to the Iraqi other, it had become almost impossible. But
that's because they waited - six months! - until war had broken out before
taking any interest in a country which, until then, they had chastely passed
by. During the time when French arms sales to Iraq kept several hundred
thousands of people working in France, you never saw friendly TV reports
on that providential land. And when Saddam lost the war, I don't recall
any great upsurge of tele-curiosity concerning the Iraqis. Before and after,
there was only the simple curiosity to go see for yourself what had never
really been. In its place was the Kurdish image. Media-wise, we exchanged
the non-image of the Iraqi other for the over-image of the
Kurdish other. As though the latter had accepted to hop up and replace
a recalcitrant actor (for no charge). So today you get a kind of nausea
before all this beautiful human suffering, which is even more moving because
the Kurdish cause is hopeless and because the Kurds, betrayed by the whole
world, are really beaten, at least. Whereas we still don't know how many
Iraqis were killed during the war, and what with the Arab habit that consists,
alas, in carrying off only defeats, the official line from Baghdad
is probably that the Iraqis won. So what use are images, when nothing stands
as "proof" anymore?

It was stupid enough on Saddam Hussein's part to undervalue the extent
to which he would lose face. But face is not a look in the eyes,
and the whole question may be right there between two words. The only image
that exists in the Arab world is the image of the Leader. In France you
still have the effigy of the Republic, Marianne, which is different from
a leader or a picture of the president, but you only see it in the city
halls, it's residual. What the Arab world has slowly gotten used to is
this love relation with the leader, especially in moments of crisis, when
the leader proves to be above all a loser. Misplaced pride that consists
of swelling the biceps and hiding the victims, and that finally leads to
the victims' masochistic identification with the biceps. Now, showing the
victims, counting them out one by one, calling them by their names,
is at least a way of recognizing the fact that they are human beings and
that they have a right to the look in their eye, battered as it may be.

The question isn't specific to that part of the world. It's no doubt
the pure and simple question of feudalism - and that one really stymies
us, because we all believed the Marxists when they spoke in a condescending
tone of feudalism as an outdated, bygone mode of production. In the rich
countries today, the very modern successor to feudalism is the Mafia: the
United States, Italy, Japan, etc. In the countries that have just come
out of the deep-freeze it's a well-known reality: the USSR, China. In the
poor countries, the Mafia is still the clan that kidnaps the political
power and plays baby-toy with weapons and the code of honor. It's normal
that such a Mafia should have no other image than that of its current leader,
and that it should identify, for better or worse, with his distress, and
only his. It's tragic, for example, that none of the Arab leaders in the
anti-Iraqi coalition found it fitting to say a few words (even something
purely formal) about the Kurdish distress. It's even more tragic that they
don't realize for a second that those few words would ricochet into the
best possible publicity for the Palestinian cause. Masochism is not the
contrary of egotism, far from it.

But if I look on the American side, it's even more surprising. It's
like the country was testing a new definition of itself in this war. A
definition that no longer has much to do with the hyperindividualization
of the average American, a definition that completely forgets G.I. Joe
or John Doe, "the man in the street," and heads straight for General Schwarzkopf
or Colin Powell instead. We're a long way from the bloody, ambiguous but
humanly very rich memories of Vietnam and the fifteen years of films, some
of them very beautiful, that came out of that trauma-war. Nobody thought
the American identity was as tattered as it is. Given the real difficulties
of the country, you wonder what the price will be for this public demonstration
that the wound is scarred all over.

For the moment, the Americans have won two wars. The real war, the police
action, took place exactly as planned. But there was also the war of images.
During a TF1 broadcast, on a disgusting set with everybody congratulating
each other, a CNN journalist started moaning about a poll published in
the U.S., according to which people felt there were too many images of
the war, that all those images played into enemy hands, that there was
no need to see so many. America has succeeded in what Saddam attempted:
the blind retribalization of its population, including the support
of the traditional victims of American society - Blacks, Latinos - who
were thrilled to be among the victors for once, like Colin Powell, no doubt
Bush's next running mate.

Let's return to the distinction between the image and the visual. The
visual is the verification that something functions. In that sense, clichés
and stereotypes are part of the visual. For example, there's a visual minimum
of Arab presence in France, it's the immigrant's face. But beyond that
"face" (without eyes) there is a general inability to tell the particular
story of any single immigrant, whether first or second generation.
As soon as we start talking about the "Arab in the street," the group is
always what's filmed and the group is always what speaks. Participating
in a collective protects them, it's what makes them exist in relation to
their enemy on the corner, the cops that hassle them or their racist neighbors.
The result: their discourse is uninteresting, it's a sentimental wooden
tongue that will always favor fantasy over imagination - and the media
couldn't be happier that " the Arab in the street" is always ready to run
off at the mouth about Saddam or the Palestinians.

During the war, the TV people obviously said to themselves: we have
to watch out, we have to "cover" the Arab in the street, the
immigrant
kids and all that. So we see a litany of depressing images of street hysteria,
particularly in North Africa. As though today the word "masses," abandoned
along with the ideals of communism, could only be applied to the Arabs.
As though the heritage of leftism and Third-World liberation were there
and there only. As though the dead ends of identity (which only
serves to infantilize and offer pleasure in that infantilization) had become
an Arab monopoly. As though we had forgotten that the Arab world, our neighbors
and our cousins for so long, is a generally non-violent world, though given
to exaggerated rhetoric. Finally, as though North African immigration in
France, over the last fifty years, weren't the most peaceful immigration
that's ever been! Myself, when I think of the others' identity madness,
I look apprehensively toward Hindu fundamentalism and Serb tribalism, not
toward the neurosis of the Arabs.

And yet there's a moment when someone like me is obliged to take his
distance from the way both the French media and the "Arab masses" go about
fabricating a massive and menacing image of the Arab world, on the basis
of its "humiliation." What has changed since that faraway era when we were
leftists is that now I do it in the name of values that belong to my
culture, even if I'm not certain that those values might not soon be in
the minority again. But I'm too old to waver on the little I've learned
from thirty years of demagogy and hysteria combined. It comes down to this:
every individual figure is that much taken back from the fascinating
(and fascistic) sirens of communitarianism. Does a French-speaking Arab
intellectual need Montesquieu to emerge as an individual voice? If so,
good for him. Can he do it from a strictly Arab background, Ibn Khaldoun
or Ibn Arabi? In a sense, I don't need to know. But what else can you expect?

That puts you in a rather touchy situation with respect to your oldest
Arab friends, because you feel like telling them that nobody's going to
dispense them from having the courage to say "Me,I," the courage to go
against the community flow and to do without all the advantages, material
and otherwise, that come from setting up on the sly between two worlds.
I remember how sad I felt when Kale Yacine died: when things were really
going bad in Algeria we always tried to get in touch with him, simply because
he talked straight. That wasn't so easy for us either. The West is terribly
clumsy about recomposing forms of the social tie, of conviviality, of complicity,
to fit in with individualist societies based on the market. It's tough
to deal with, and there's always something morose about it. It often seems
that the attendant mediocrity is going to depress us once and for all.
And at the same time, there's always an unavowed nostalgia for a more organic
past, which is not so far from us and whose futile remains can be found
in national-Lepenism today (and yesterday in the French Communist party.)

That's why the Arab world, with its amazing social ecology that has
outlived centuries of political decline, has long represented for some
of us a highly vibrant reservoir of a certain social affectivity. Nowhere
else is the other so well conceived, as long as he is concrete,
as long as he is the stranger to whom you owe respect. But the tragedy,
and a tragedy that becomes inevitable given the economic state of the world,
is that nobody in the Arab world can conceive of the abstract other.
Universalism seems to have stopped in mid-stride, and the forces of a return
to the village, and a return to the terrible lack of curiosity toward the
rest of the worlds, signify to we Westerners that we remain all alone with
our still-conquering and often empty universalism.

It's astonishing to see how the inward turn of the Americans has freed
up that old story of the Crusades as our problem (here in Europe.)
Sometimes I think it may just be unforgettable on the Arab side. It's a
frustrated love story between the former losers (after all, the crusaders
were clearly less civilized and were kicked out in the end) and the new
losers (the Arabs helped the modern world in its birth pangs, but haven't
accompanied it on its adventures.) Today, when people talk about humiliation,
what I hear is rather the fact for the Arabs of not having been recognized
by the only interlocutor who ever existed for them, the old European-Christian
road buddy, the one who "succeeded in life." The relationship to America
seems much more superifical to me America is at once the most desirable
and the most powerful country, and because it's the most powerful it has
been made into the great Satan, the only one worth being beaten by. If
the Machrek Arabs had a real historical memory, it's the English they should
hate to death. Because as far as a pernicious and effective political strategy
goes, the Foreign Office remains unbeatable!

Is television democratic? What's democratic, I think, is to look into
that collective mirror and make the distinction between what can be done,
what we know how to do (and news technologies are more advanced than ever),
and what doesn't come cheap, what's difficult. It doesn't bother me when
they say on the TV that no journalists were sent to Iraq because Saddam
Hussein opposed it. But it ought to be said in such a way that the tele-spectator
says to himself, "Hmm, we're missing that image," and so that he doesn't
forget that image. Myself, I learned that from Godard. In an old issue
of CAHIERS DU CINEMA, ten years back, he asked us to illustrate an interview
with him by putting in big white spaces blocked out with lines and captioned
"here, the usual photo." It was a way to say that in any case, photos serve
to paste over a void, to decorate, to supply what I now call "the visual"
- but not to show anything.

By leaving the space empty, he showed the possibility of not
pasting over. Today I have the feeling that we've lost, that Godard has
lost, and that the media - with the TV in the lead - forbid us to think
: "Hmm, we're missing an image, let's leave that slot empty, let's wait
to fill it." The fear of the void is so strong that it takes us over as
well. The void is no longer a dialectical moment between two fulls, it's
what you must "make them forget." That's why, as I was just saying, we
"forgot" to demand reports on vanquished Iraq, just as we forget to ask
the immigrant kids in the suburbs what they now think of Saddam Hussein.

I wrote a text where I tried out the following metaphor: the news is
now like a sweeper-car, scooping things up one at a time, illuminating
a line of objects on a floating market. A surveillance camera doesn't complain
if it hasn't recorded any event. It's in the idiocy of live for live's
sake. It confuses actuality and news. What was the news for most average
French people? That Iraq was not Saudi Arabia. That's not much, even if
it's something. But for those of us who knew it already? Nothing.

On December 31, I saw a very short report on Baghdad, the nightclubs,
people drinking whiskey, girls without veils, people who seemed not to
believe in the war and who looked like they were having fun. It was exactly
like here. Why was it such a minor piece, almost folklore? Why not do a
real duplex between here and Baghdad, all night long on the 31st? Maybe
that's how the difference between Baghdad and Kuwait could really appear,
maybe that's how we could break through the ready-to-think, the cliché,
the already-seen.

And why, after the war broke out, didn't we see any reports on the archeological
sites, on Ur, on one of humanity's birthplaces, and on the dangers? You
wouldn't have to be a journalistic genius to have the modest idea (but
there are a hundred others) that one way of speaking about Iraq could be
the passion of French Assryilogist worrying about the sites. The TV doesn't
think like that, it waits until it's too late before connecting all its
studios and exhibiting vain logistics that quickly end up serving the politicos
and military.

OK, there are six channels in France, and you can leave one, the most
popular, TF1, as the servile echo of all the big influences. But even people
in the know, even the intellectuals (as naive as anyone else) needed some
more information, if only on channel 7. Why couldn't film buffs have seen
the propaganda films that Tawfiq Saleh and Salah Abou Seif (the best Egyptian
filmmakers) made a few years ago to the greater glory of Iraq? A superproduction
of the battle of Qadisiyyah is pretty interesting if you want to understand
Saddam's paranoia.

The problem with the image of the Palestinians has to do with the dispersion
of the real Palestinians. I can't make brilliant Americans like Edward
Said, the kids of the Intifada, the businessmen who propel the Kuwaiti
economy, the combatants in Lebanon, the refugees in Jordan, and my old
friend Soufian Ramahi co-exist in my head. And if I think I can't do it,
it's because between the word and the thing, the word - the word "Palestinians"
- has won out. It's a word with success, it's a pure signifier, at once
umbrella and alibi for everybody. And we know how much easier is to die
for a word than to work for the image of a thing. So there is no complex
image of Palestinian reality, and that, I'm afraid, plays into everyone's
hands. The image of Arafat is empty, free-spinning, unsinkable. It's a
cliché, in the sense that a cliché is an image that can no
longer evolve. No doubt this cliché is useful for the survival of
the word "cause," but it doesn't function as much more than an advertising
label.

I remember a film shot in 1976 by some pro-Palestinian friends, entitled
THE OLIVE TREE. Already in this film there was one image too many and one
image missing. The image too many was the one offered by the PLO, the "lion
cubs," the children militarized in the camps. I had to explain that such
an image makes bad propaganda in the West, which is the (only) part of
the world where people long ago quit being enthusiastic at the sight of
children in arms. OK, the people from THE OLIVE TREE didn't keep that image,
but when Godard filmed UNTIL THE VICTORY, which in the end was called ICI
ET AILLEURS, well, Godard didn't think he should censure that same image
of the training of children. I remember a little girl who made a mistake
in her motions, who had an instant of fright, and that's the image which
is unforgettable for me. But that image means people are going to die,
and she knows it.

As to the missing image, still in THE OLIVE TREE, it's when Marius Schattner
explains in a very sweet voice that underneath the Israeli colony (which
we see) there is, buried, covered over, a Palestinian village (which we
do not see). I also remember that because at CAHIERS DU CINEMA we were
among the few who had always known that the love of cinema also means knowing
what to do with images that are really missing. And the image of
the Palestinians was already difficult. The Palestinians themselves didn't
help. When we saw Michel Khleifi's films we regained some hope: it was
clear to see that there were concrete Palestinians and concrete Israeli
soldiers, and you understood that Israel had lost the capacity to propose
an image as effective as the image of the kibbutzim in the fifties, or
the image of EXODUS, because the Israeli nation-state had become too rigid
to run the risk of an image.

When the other begins to lack, each of the camps pulls back to its "visual,"
one in its real State, the other "in all the states" of its imaginary.

Serge Daney devoted a number of pieces to the media coverage
of war, in LIBERATION and on the radio. When he summed up these reflections
in CAHIERS DU CINEMA (April 1991), he proposed the idea of a distinction
between the image and the visual. The REVUE DES ETUDES PALESTINIENNES asked
him to make this distinction more explicit.

Originally published in French in REVUE DES ETUDES PALESTINIENNES
40, Paris, Summer 1991 and in English in DOCUMENTA X.